Originally posted by no1marauder
The first article has nothing to do with "American universities" which were the subject of your rant (see last post on previous page). The US data I provided seems considerably at odds with the UK data given in the Guardian piece.

The second article is a "the sky is really blue and water is really wet" one. It does not prove any point you have made to ...[text shortened]... st graduates, higher education leads to much better earnings than those earned by non-graduates,

Both are articles about higher education in the UK and I see nothing in my post to suggest that they are part of the conversation between us. I replied to you in a separate post.

Nontheless they are both on-topic. The UK under neoliberals has been borrowing a lot of educational policies from the US and the results are dire. You need to appreciate that since 1979, the UK has ceased to have left wing policies in government and has been moving rapidly away from traditional industrial and economic policies to re-brand the country as the world's favourite tax haven. Bear in kind that many of the tax havens in the world are "crown dependencies" meaning they are British but pretend otherwise.

The articles show, all the same, what other sources will show for the US education system. For example,

===="The result can be seen in research published last August by the Oxford economists Ken Mayhew and Craig Holmes. They found that the UK now has proportionately more graduates than any other rich country bar Iceland – yet uses their brains much less than most other countries: the “underutilisation” of graduates – at work but not using their skills – is higher in the UK than anywhere in the EU bar Romania, Greece, Croatia, Latvia and Slovenia.

So what are our graduates doing? Jobs that previously didn’t need a degree. Over one in 10 childminders (11.5%, according to the 2014 Labour Force Survey) are graduates. One in six call-centre staff have degrees, as do about one in four of all air cabin crew and theme-park attendants. In a labour market flooded with graduates, picky employers are now able to take the CVs boasting a university education. And so any young person who didn’t go to university now stands to be treated as a second-class employee." ===

As you can see, the earning premium does indeed exist but it is a fraud. What is really happening is the systematic exclusion of the working class from economic opportunities.

Originally posted by no1marauder
You might take such a statement as a challenge to present empirical facts supporting claims such as universities' products have "declining intrinsic value", that "prestige" ones systemically exclude all but the children of the elite (in fact most of those types of institutions have programs encouraging diversity to the point of affirmative action) and that the American university system is in "decay" relative to what it was in the past.

I did not say universities are "in decay" so much as they have been hijacked and put to different work. They have done excellent work in persuading growing proportions of young people to "invest" huge sums in an education that is a fraud.

Meanwhile universities, instead of providing our democracies with engines of creativity and innovation, have been taken over by conservative and commercial interests and put to work making a profit, at the expense of integrity and academic freedom.

You claim I was arguing on the basis of ideology, I replied with a refutation of that claim and indeed pointed out the reality that you are buried in neoliberal ideology so deep you cannot see it any more.

There are different levels of empirical evidence that I might deploy. Much depends how exhaustive this debate were to be. I consider that I gave enough for the purpose. The objective, remember, is not to get you to change your mind - an unrealistic goal - but simply to make my argument in opposition to yours. However, as I have already said, much of my discussion arises from reading a history of university education within a book (The Sociology of Philosophies) by Professor Randall Collins of Pennsylvania University, not - I am sure - a hotbed of Marxist revisionism.

Originally posted by finnegan
I did not say universities are "in decay" so much as they have been hijacked and put to different work. They have done excellent work in persuading growing proportions of young people to "invest" huge sums in an education that is a fraud.

Meanwhile universities, instead of providing our democracies with engines of creativity and innovation, have been tak ...[text shortened]... r Randall Collins of Pennsylvania University, not - I am sure - a hotbed of Marxist revisionism.

Even casual readers of this forum know that I reject pretty much every tenet of neoliberal ideology; you might as well call me a Randian or a monarchist.

I see no refutation of any claim, just a doubling down of rhetoric with little evidence to support your claims. If you really are uninterested in persuasion of any sorts, a Debates forum is an odd place to post in. Making an argument in opposition to someone else should really include something more than stamping your feet and saying something different from what they say; an argument not based on empirical facts belongs more in Spirituality than here.

Originally posted by finnegan
Both are articles about higher education in the UK and I see nothing in my post to suggest that they are part of the conversation between us. I replied to you in a separate post.

Nontheless they are both on-topic. The UK under neoliberals has been borrowing a lot of educational policies from the US and the results are dire. You need to appreciate that s ...[text shortened]... s really happening is the systematic exclusion of the working class from economic opportunities.

Even granting everything in this post, it's decidedly unclear how such societal changes are the fault of universities. That there has been a sharp decline in good paying working class jobs is beyond dispute, but how that is related to the expansion of educational opportunities for the working class is something you'll have to explain. I'll grant you that neoliberal economic policies have resulted in a decline of such jobs in the "developed" World but that is a structural outcome of capitalism not something caused by the policies of universities.

Originally posted by no1marauder
Even granting everything in this post, it's decidedly unclear how such societal changes are the fault of universities. That there has been a sharp decline in good paying working class jobs is beyond dispute, but how that is related to the expansion of educational opportunities for the working class is something you'll have to explain. I'll grant you that ...[text shortened]... that is a structural outcome of capitalism not something caused by the policies of universities.

I discussed universities but I do not recall blaming universities for all the ills of neoliberalism.

Bernie Sanders is making a big issue of student debt in the US and I have to assume that is for reasons similar to the protests in the UK over student debt. It is a matter of framing the issues. To a neoliberal, education is an investment which an individual makes to achieve an expected financial return in future earnings. ( As such it is a crap investment for most students, but wealthy students have parents to simply make the cost disappear). To others, education is an investment a country makes in the knowledge base of its people. To a neoliberal, education is a machine providing qualifications for the benefit of employers; anything else is a useless indulgence. To others the point of education and especially of universities as institutions was primarily to pursue knowledge and innovation for their own sake - meaning free of government, church and business control. The rewards have been staggering and to allow this tradition to die is a disaster.

The university as qualifications machine has become the dominant principle in recent decades. Academic standards and freedom have suffered. Not enough is being done to defend them. Part of the fraud is that universities are not even the best way to train for many important careers, or not in degree courses isolated from practical experience. Opening access to university to huge addditional numbers is not a substitue for apprenticeships, for continuing vocational training alongside employment, or for adult education which in the UK certainly have all been destroyed.

The loss of productive and well paid work is not the result of the unseen hand of the market but a product of conscious policy making. Countries like France and Germany have taken steps to ensure they retain their industrial base. The UK has allowed everything to evaporate for the benefit of financial markets, but far from introducing a new era of free markets, they just handed over all the work to other countries. The UK, obsessed with free markets, refuses to enable the EC to bar imports of cheap steel from China, where there is huge over capacity. As an example of a ludicrous result, the port of Liverpool recently bought steel cranes (basically simple frames of steel girders, but very big indeed) weighing several thousand tons and costing £100m from China, sailing them across the globe, because the Chinese gave subsidised prices to undercut British steelmakers. Our steel industry is now closing down for lack of government protection, but other countries are not so stupid.

In America, you are following a fascinating programme by which you take manufacturing away from unionised states, open factories in Mexico or further afield, then transfer the work back into states that allow the exclusion of unions and offer vastly inferior conditions of employment to a hungry workforce. Aletrnatively, corporations which have benefitted from the collaboration of the US state for so long have discovered that they are now global. The locate their factories in Asian or developing countries, including states of the former Soviet Union, often located to feed into the evolving markets of the vast Eurasian landmass. Although they make profits around the globe, they do not repatriate these to the US and instead hold trillions of dollars in tax havens to keep them away from US taxes, but also away from the US economy.

The reality is that work is being destroyed in the interests of neoliberal ideals and to attribute this to some impersonal, abstract market force is deluded. While the US and the UK are cheerfully dismantling their industrial traditions, other countries are building theirs up and looking to new markets which the US and the West does not dominate as it once hoped. Look to India, China, the former Soviet Union and yes the Islamic nations that the US has mistreated for so long, and you will one day wake up to notice they are evolving into a vast market which does not look to the West for anything much. We will be reduced in time to selling them opium again.

Meanwhile, the UK government recently decided to increase the national minimum wage from a joke to a pittance. It emerged that over 30% of British workers would benefit. That is the extent to which low pay has come to prevail and that is the reality of paid work for a growing proportion of British workers. In the USA the relative comparisons ought to take into account that we still have a national health service, while you have a national profit making enterprise that watches Americans die for profit, so you need to earn more to live - literally.

Neoliberalism manufactures poverty. It is not a result of abstract market forces but a political choice.

Originally posted by no1marauder
Even casual readers of this forum know that I reject pretty much every tenet of neoliberal ideology; you might as well call me a Randian or a monarchist.

I see no refutation of any claim, just a doubling down of rhetoric with little evidence to support your claims. If you really are uninterested in persuasion of any sorts, a Debates forum is an odd pl ...[text shortened]... what they say; an argument not based on empirical facts belongs more in Spirituality than here.

My arguments do not lack empirical support - where that is relevant and worth providing. But I am not so foolish as to set myself the goal of changing your mind.

You differ from the more right wing Americans here in that you are less extreme. I agree that you would not fit the label of Randian for example. In many matters you are the very soul of enlightened humanist values and I do not tend to argue with you when you are behaving yourself accordingly. You are quite an enlightened sort of neoliberal but our debates have demonstrated that you repeatedly adopt a neoliberal stance, not least in your advocacy of the patron saint of Liberalism, whose name would be a distraction here.
You also have a tendency to descend into apoplexy and personal abuse which is actually amusing for a while, and worth provoking, but unproductive.

Originally posted by finnegan
Both are articles about higher education in the UK and I see nothing in my post to suggest that they are part of the conversation between us. I replied to you in a separate post.

Nontheless they are both on-topic. The UK under neoliberals has been borrowing a lot of educational policies from the US and the results are dire. You need to appreciate that s ...[text shortened]... s really happening is the systematic exclusion of the working class from economic opportunities.

What that seems to reinforce is that employers value practical experience over academic credentials.

My oldest daughter discovered that when she graduated, her peers who went to work in their fields after high school were more valued by their employers than was her degree. They had four years of actual real world experience. Only if they attempted to change course, did the education make a difference.

The post that was quoted here has been removed

To some extent it has no choice but to serve the State, which regulates it, and subsidizes it.

It must at least acknowledge the market, as long as users still have to pay something.

What it must teach depends on the State, the Market, and the conscience of the institution.

Originally posted by finnegan
The ideology in play on this forum is neoliberalism and it is quite clear that you uncritically swallow its tenets.

Calling No1 a neoliberal is one of the most outlandish and absurd characterization I can recall on this forum.

Hell, even I'm not a neoliberal, but No1 has been a consistent advocate of economic liberalism (within a capitalism framework, perhaps) since time immemorial.

Originally posted by sh76
Calling No1 a neoliberal is one of the most outlandish and absurd characterization I can recall on this forum.

Hell, even I'm not a neoliberal, but No1 has been a consistent advocate of economic liberalism (within a capitalism framework, perhaps) since time immemorial.

Whole lot a labeling going on.

Originally posted by sh76
Calling No1 a neoliberal is one of the most outlandish and absurd characterization I can recall on this forum.

Hell, even I'm not a neoliberal, but No1 has been a consistent advocate of economic liberalism (within a capitalism framework, perhaps) since time immemorial.

The term "neoliberal" is not especially meaningful, since Liberal is what we all intend by the word, but it is often used to get around American usage of Liberal to mean the opposite of Liberal. I reverted to the accurate term Liberal to remind No1 of his obsessive devotion to Locke, the apostle of Liberalism and the hidden hand of the market.

I appreciate why I often have to concede to the American usage of these terms. I do not concede that Americans are ignorant of the alternatives.

Originally posted by finnegan
The term "neoliberal" is not especially meaningful, since Liberal is what we all intend by the word, but it is often used to get around American usage of Liberal to mean the opposite of Liberal. I reverted to the accurate term Liberal to remind No1 of his obsessive devotion to Locke, the apostle of Liberalism and the hidden hand of the market.

I apprec ...[text shortened]... merican usage of these terms. I do not concede that Americans are ignorant of the alternatives.

In late 20th Century usage, the term "neoliberal" refers to a conservative laissez faire ideology associated with Reagan, Thatcher, the Washington Consensus, etc. etc.:

It takes from the basic principles of neoclassical economics, suggesting that governments must limit subsidies, make reforms to tax law in order to expand the tax base, reduce deficit spending, limit protectionism, and open markets up to trade. It also seeks to abolish fixed exchange rates, back deregulation, permit private property, and privatize businesses run by the state.

Liberalism, in economics, refers to a freeing of the economy by eliminating regulations and barriers that restrict what actors can do. Neoliberal policies aim for a laissez-faire approach to economic development.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/neoliberalism.asp

Given your confusion over what Locke believed, it is hardly surprising that you conflate his type of Liberalism with Thatcherite neoliberalism. But your intellectual shortcomings in this area hardly justify the labeling of others into categories that they obviously don't fit into.

If you insist on attaching a label to my ideological beliefs, the most accurate term would be Leftist Libertarian. I suggest you take a gander at the first paragraph of the section "Classical liberal radicalism" in this Wiki article for further details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism

Originally posted by no1marauder
In late 20th Century usage, the term "neoliberal" refers to a conservative laissez faire ideology associated with Reagan, Thatcher, the Washington Consensus, etc. etc.:

It takes from the basic principles of neoclassical economics, suggesting that governments must limit subsidies, make reforms to tax law in order to expand the tax base, reduce deficit ...[text shortened]... ism" in this Wiki article for further details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism

Yes
Yes
Yes
Had all this before.
Maybe so. Your ideoogical status shifts with different topics. But we had this debate.